National Grid committed to installing weather stations throughout New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts to keep communities safer by providing real-time alerts and forecasts to local officials, first responders and others who require real-time local weather.

Jim Madej, National Grid’s senior vice president and chief customer officer said. “With a more robust network of local weather monitoring stations, National Grid will be able to monitor and respond to local weather situations much more accurately, meaning, for example, we should be able to reduce the amount of time it takes to restore power after a storm.”

Earth Networks, the parent company of WeatherBug®, has been deploying weather sensors at schools and making weather more hands-on for K-12 students for 20 years. Today, the network includes sensors at thousands of schools, public buildings, parks and other sites that provide live weather data 24/7.

Gordon Creek Elementary in Ballston Spa, NY, has an on-site weather station that measures conditions including temperature, wind speed and direction, precipitation, humidity and more. The station also calculates heat index, an essential factor when determining the safety of high school athletes and visitors.

Students will be able to use the weather data from their hometown as they learn how to analyze and graph data for both their math and science lessons.

“This inventive collaboration with National Grid and Earth Networks provides our students with the opportunity to be part of a national network as they utilize the real time date from the rooftop WeatherBug station in their science lessons and in the classroom daily,” said Joseph P. Dragone, Ph.D., Superintendent of the Ballston Spa Central School District.